Anzuelo h/c back

Waves and waves of gobsmackingly beautiful watercolours - a full 300 pages of them - after a sudden tsunami washes three individuals irreversibly away from their former lives and into each other's shore-stranded arms.

As the young adults struggle to reorientate themselves to their new environment and relatively solitary existence, they discover that they have - in different ways - each become startlingly transformed, both physically and in their newfound perspectives.

Enormous, humanoid yet unknowable sea creatures appear to play a pivotal if infathomable role in the waters around them...

If you consider this summary a little allusive, elusive or oblique then that's not an entirely inappropriate approximation to the narrative style of ANZUELO. Rios has gifted some of the panels with subtle yet vital details to be gleaned as you go, and concentration is rewarded. She's also provided a list of cultural inspirations in the afterword which may be worth looking at to see if you're going to be in synch.

Me, I could happily spend over an hour in slack-jawed wonder at so many of these gobsmackingly swoonaway pages, and there are so very many of them! Three HUNDRED. What a body of work!

The publisher writes:

"A gorgeous and brutal story that revolts against the notion of violence as the only response to a life without hope. The Sea, secretly more complex than anyone imagined, rises one day. The horizon folds as the Sea absorbs the world and transforms everything that's been pulled inside it. Three kids find themselves unmoored and lost, but brought together by the physical and mental changes wrought by the tides and a desire to avoid harming any living creature. Anzuelo is the new graphic novel by the Eisner award-winning cartoonist Emma Ríos."